When I think back to the time of the release of IE7, I was surprised that there wasn't border-radius support. It seems like an obviously great idea to have a css-property name for rounded corners, which can potentially make a site look less like it came from the computer stone-age.

Finally, today we have IE9 and Microsoft finally decided to play ball with the rest of the world. But the question remains, why didn't Microsoft bother to support border-radius in IE8?

The problem probably became obvious to the company as the growing chorus of complaints from web developers got louder after the release of IE7.

Was the company so isolated or in group-think mode that they were blind for that many years?

Or did Microsoft have some additional motive to suppress the border-radius property?